Kendall Grant Clark, faculty research associate in the University of Maryland’s semantic web lab, wrote an interesting XML.com article about the courtship of Atom and who’s courting whom.
FOAF plus Atom (or FOAF plus your favorite RSS flavor) is to the Semantic Web what home pages were to the Web. A machine-readable description of a person, plus a machine-readable version of that person’s web space, is enough Semantic Web for us to do really great things, whether or not the hard KR stuff ever amounts to anything at all.
This idea is exactly what I was trying to get Technorati to understand last night.